A Perfectly Rational Fear
by Xenos394
Summary: Tali'Zorah is many things; a technological prodigy, a highly capable fighter and she also happens to be arachnophobic to her very core. This is my take on how she acquired that fear. EDIT: I remembered Garrus also has issues with spiders, so I added a short sequel (for want of a better term). EDIT 2: After an excellent reviewer suggestion, Wrex's perspective is now up.
1. A Perfectly Rational Fear

**Disclaimer:** I do not own or make any claim to the Mass Effect universe or the characters contained in this story, all of which are owned by BioWare and Electronic Arts. This is simply my interpretation of some events within the game universe.

**[AN: Ever since Tali's arachnophobia was revealed in ME3, I had always wondered where she might have got it from considering Rannoch has no insect, and therefore presumably arthropod, analogues of any type therefore making it **_**highly**_** unlikely that the Migrant Fleet would have a spider infestation.**

**This is what I came up with. /AN]**

**A Perfectly Rational Fear:**

"Hey Tali, watch out for spiders when you're moving through the service tunnels; scuttlebutt says there's some big ones down there at the moment." One of the human engineers, Crosby she thought it was, called out casually as she was just beginning to lower herself through the hatch leading to the interconnecting rows of narrow service and maintenance tunnels that criss-crossed the amazingly high-tech Frigate. Tali peered curiously at the man as she tried to work out what the 'spider' he mentioned was and why her translator had picked that moment to fail her. Before she could ask for clarification, Chief Adam's was already chastising the other Engineer, though she didn't understand why.

"Come on Silas, give the girl a break! She's only been here for a week and she doesn't need you filling her head with the scuttlebutt's fantasies." The senior engineer scolded his younger compatriot before shooting Tali a reassuring smile.

Deciding that her curiosity could wait, she lowered herself the last couple of feet and closed the hatch behind her, pushing all thoughts of these mysterious 'spiders' to the back of her mind while she focused on familiarising herself with the power distribution system used within the _Normandy_.

After half an hour of crouch-walking around the technological wonderland she found herself in, the most surprising thing she had noticed was how _clean_ everything was. There was none of the dust that usually coated everything like a translucent patina, none of the carbon scoring that had always accompanied any sort of electrical system on the _Rayya_, none of the grime and corrosion that resulted from centuries of active use that she was so familiar with in the bowels of the Flotilla's myriad ships. It just served to hammer home how _new_ the _Normandy_ was, barely a month out of the shipyard, and _she_ got to be part of its engineering team! She still couldn't believe her luck.

Pushing aside her giddiness to be working on the ship, she returned to studying every inch of its internal systems while her mind drifted back to how immaculately clean everything was. In fact, there was only one build-up that marred the almost spotless environment; strange, remarkably thin strands of some odd material that clung to her suit as she brushed past. It proved to be very hard to remove but she wasn't particularly worried; such stains and residues were hardly new to her and they all washed of easily enough in her experience. Still, she had never encountered such a strange residue in all her time working on ships in the Flotilla.

'Perhaps it is a phenomenon peculiar to human ships, or maybe new ships; the fleet hasn't had a new ship for generations. It's almost… pretty with how it catches the light, much nicer than the oil stains and rust patches that normally fill these tunnels.' She thought to herself as she continued on her expedition.

Three hours later, she found herself sitting in the Mess Hall, sipping on a tube of Nutrient Paste as her mind wandered back to the strange warning about 'spiders' she had received earlier. She briefly contemplated seeing if Shepard was in his cabin so she could ask him, but dismissed the thought immediately as she remembered how tired he had been in the last week. After dealing with the mission to Feros and then the Terrorist attack on Terra Nova she didn't want to disturb him for something so minor as asking what a word meant, even if she would have liked the excuse to talk to him some more.

Instead, she keyed her omni-tool and accessed the ever-reliable extranet for information. Opening the first page from her query, she began to read:

"Spiders are a member of the Arachnida class of invertebrates that inhabit the Human Homeworld, Earth, and are analogous to species of a similar nature found on numerous worlds. All spiders have eight legs used for locomotion and the capacity to produce spider silk, a material of remarkable strength and elasticity. They are also exclusively predatory, with some species being patient ambush predators, while others are active hunters that run down their prey. Whatever hunting style used, spiders kill their prey by injecting a venom that paralyses their unfortunate victim, followed by digestive enzymes that begin to dissolve their prey's body before the spider consumes it. With nearly 50 000 known species, they can be found in almost any environment, even starships!"

Kaidan would find her an hour later in a nearly catatonic state as she scrolled through pages upon pages of information about spider biology, their venom and its effects on the human body and worst of all, images of the various forms of eight-legged demon that lived on Earth. Shrugging off Kaidan's attempts to close down her omni-tool, she continued her fear-induced research well into the next shift cycle, her forgotten tube of nutrient paste still connected to her helmet. It was only after she had exhausted all of the links provided by her first extranet query that she finally shut down her omni-tool and settled into a fitful night's sleep in her sleeper pod (after very thoroughly checking it for spiders… four times).

* * *

The next morning, Adams found himself becoming rather concerned about his Quarian charge. She had been doing an excellent job learning the ropes over the last week and she usually had this enthusiasm which brightened up the whole shift. But today she was far more subdued and seemed to be stuck in a cycle where she would enter a near daydream state that she would suddenly jerk out with a shudder between 2-10 minutes later and begin working feverishly at whatever task she had in front of her for half an hour or so before slipping back into the daydream. He had tried asking her if something was wrong but she just nervously waved away his concern and focused even harder on her work.

At first he had put it down to the effects of a stressful week of combat and her difficulty adjusting to life on the Normandy; but three hours later and Adams was on the verge of asking the Commander to come and talk with her and see if he could get her to tell him what was wrong. Before he could do that, though, Tali finished at her console and asked if she could go back to the maintenance tunnels to check some of the areas she didn't see yesterday. Deciding that maybe all she needed was a change of scenery to get her head back in the game he agreed without hesitation.

* * *

Tali desperately needed to clear her head, so while others might go for a workout or watch a vid to achieve such a result, she decided to go back to her recently discovered mechanical paradise that was the _Normandy's_ interior. If wandering around down there for the rest of the shift couldn't take her mind off her spider-related thoughts, nothing would.

She followed one passage that ran the length of the Main Gun (so that the capacitors and superconductive wiring could be maintained and replaced easily), admiring the quality of the technology employed and making some minor tweaks here and there where someone had installed something in too much of a rush or where that strange sticky, filament-like residue had become quite dense.

After ten minutes of this she had almost completely forgotten about how the hypothetical damage a levo-protein based neurotoxin could be to a dextro-protein based species with a severely overactive immune system, which had been draining a significant portion of her focus for the last hour or so. So distracted was she by the technology on display before her, that she nearly missed a small dark shadow scuttling toward her from a little crack between two bundles of wiring off to her side. She caught sight of it in her peripheral vision and spun violently to face her attacker, only to find that whatever it was had stopped moving as soon as she had moved and it now waited just outside the glow of the evenly spaced lights that ran the length of the tunnels. Her visor strained to make out details in the gloom but all she could see was a small, dark body and lots of legs. It looked far too much like a spider for Tali's comfort and she tensed herself to squash the creature, or alternatively to run (scramble) screaming back to the access hatch as fast as she could in the low-ceilinged tunnels.

After ten incredibly tense seconds, the dark shape darted forward into the light, revealing an elliptical body encased in a shiny, red-brown carapace. Tali relaxed immediately as she recognised the cockroach as it darted from point to point, searching for food in the rather spartan tunnels. She had come across cockroaches in her study last night and she knew that they were harmless scavengers as well as being practically ubiquitous for humans, as they readily established themselves onboard ships and space stations. She watched in fascination as the small creature swiftly zigzagged between points of interest, antennae waving in the air in the never ending search for food. The cockroach stopped to quickly clean its antennae of dust, running them through its mouthparts, one at a time, and the predator that had been stalking it used this moment of distraction to launch its attack.

Neither Tali nor the cockroach had a chance to react as a large Huntsman spider shot out from its camouflaged position on the wall and swept up the smaller insect in its long legs before sinking its fangs deep into its thorax. The whole attack took no more than half-a-second and Tali could only stare in shock and terror at the large black and grey spider that had to be nearly the size of her faceplate as it methodically worked its fangs into the juicy body of its prey, a sickening clicking, squelching sound being the only noise beyond the background hum of electronics.

The shock wore off seconds later and Tali's fight-or-flight instinct leapt into action. Smoothly unsheathing her stiletto from its place on her boot, she struck out at the spider but only succeeded in damaging one of its legs as it raced back into the shadows, its prize clenched firmly between its fangs. Glancing around nervously, Tali hurriedly made her way back to the access point, staying as far away from the walls as she could manage and keeping her knife in hand the whole way. She finally stopped when she reached the familiar glow and background noise that told her she was back at the Engineering hatch. Slumped against the wall and bathed in the blue-white light of the drive-core, her mind had the chance to process coming within two feet of her newly discovered worst nightmare. She could see the fine grey hairs that coated its flat, broad carapace and its eight legs all curved around in front of it, lying flat to the ground, how it's numerous soulless eyes shone in the twilight of the tunnels. Tali shuddered violently as she tried to shake the image burned into her mind but it remained stubbornly in place.

Taking a few moments more to calm her raspy breathing and racing heart, she looked down the tunnel she had just left. No longer did she see a playground filled with all the technology she could ever desire; now it was a dark, foreboding space filled with monsters straight from the darkest recesses of her mind.

Taking a final deep breath before she returned to Engineering, she vowed to herself that this would not keep her from doing her job. If she needed to enter the tunnels, she would. Though she might take appropriate precautions next time, like a shotgun… and maybe a couple of grenades.

**[AN: Well I hope you enjoyed this story, any questions or feedback is welcomed, particularly constructive criticism; I'm always looking to improve.**

**For anyone wondering, the spider described is a member of the **_**Holconia**_** genus of huntsman spiders and they're endemic to Australia and a pretty common sight here, though still seriously disconcerting when you find one staring down at you from your ceiling.**

**Thanks for taking the time to read! /AN]**


	2. Precautions

**Disclaimer:** I do not own or make any claim to the Mass Effect universe or the characters contained in this story, all of which are owned by BioWare and Electronic Arts. This is simply my interpretation of some events within the game universe.

**[AN: I recently remembered that Garrus as an inordinate dislike of spiders as well, so here is the unplanned extension of the first chapter! It's very short, but it's not like there was a lot of plot in the first chapter either. /AN]**

**Precautions**

Garrus watched in amusement as Tali strode purposefully across the Cargo Bay, grabbed her shotgun out of her locker, gave it a quick check over, then slid it into position on her suit and swept back into Engineering.

It had become a common sight in the last couple of days; whenever she was entering the maze of maintenance tunnels beneath the decks, she would always take her shotgun with her now. The other engineers said it had something to do with spiders.

Thinking about it always got a chuckle out of the Turian; spiders were nothing new to him, Palaven had its own equivalent after all. The small, web-spinning, multi-legged invertebrates were a common sight across Palaven, both in rural and urban environments. He had always found it laughable that the fear of spiders was a common condition among humans, no Turian he had ever heard of would be afraid of something so tiny and harmless. Of course, the human members of the crew and even those he knew back in C-Sec always tried to justify it, attempting to prove that there were good reasons to be scared of these 'spiders'. At first he had assumed that it was simply some sort of joke, like their insistence in the existence of giant hominids that allegedly lived in remote locations around their planet; that one had some Salarian's xenobiologists excited for _years_ until they finally worked out it was little more than a myth (though they only accepted this conclusion after several meticulous surveys of the relevant areas). But it became quite clear to Garrus that there was in fact a widespread phobia of spiders amongst humans and it had clearly affected their perception of the creatures; they insisted that some had venom that could kill an adult human in a couple of hours and that others were the size of a data-slate.

Smirking to himself, Garrus slid himself back underneath the Mako and went back to clearing the grit that they had picked up on X-57 out of the suspension joints and making sure they were sufficiently lubricated and mobile. If the suspension system ever played up in the field it could have dire consequences, so Garrus always paid special attention to the joints; especially considering how often he was fighting inside the, ah… 'unique' vehicle. Why anyone would make this a standard-issue vehicle, he would never understand.

Ten minutes into his work and a flash of movement in his periphery caught his attention. A cursory search revealed nothing in the deep shadows, and his visor couldn't see anything in other spectrums. Deciding on the old fashioned approach, he flicked on his omni-tool's torch function and was immediately confronted by one of the most horrifying sights he had ever seen (and considering he had seen Wrex eat, that was saying something). The eight-legged monstrosity lay flush with the underside of the Mako's chassis, its legs curled around its body and pointing in the direction of the stunned Turian. Its numerous eyes gleamed brightly as the light reflected off them, adding to the already disturbing appearance. Garrus noted somewhat abstractly that one of its legs was, in fact, damaged, almost as if it had been cut by something recently. The two remained locked in position for a couple of moments, before Garrus very carefully slid himself out from underneath the Mako and stood up. Taking a moment to collect himself, he strode across the Cargo Bay and opened his locker to retrieve his sidearm, before he clipped it into position over his thigh and walked back to the Mako, ignoring the strange stare William's was giving him and Wrex's smug grin.

It wasn't that he was scared or anything, it was simply a… valid precaution.

**[AN: That it for this story now, unless any other non-human ME characters happen to have a curious propensity for fear-based reactions to terrestrial arachnids. I hope you enjoyed this story and if you have any questions or feedback, please review or PM me.**

**Thanks for taking the time to read! /AN]**


	3. Respect

**Disclaimer:** I do not own or make any claim to the Mass Effect universe or the characters contained in this story, all of which are owned by BioWare and Electronic Arts. This is simply my interpretation of some events within the game universe.

**[AN: Well it turns out I wasn't quite finished with this story after all. A reviewer, Karamazov, suggested a similar set of stories for Wrex and Javik. I might come up with something for Javik, but that's dependant on a whole bunch of things, namely ideas. This is a short piece again and it's probably even less serious than the first two, so make of that what you will. Anyway, here's Wrex's perspective on the whole thing. Enjoy! /AN]**

**Respect**

Wrex chuckled quietly to himself as the Turian carefully manoeuvred back under the Mako, head flicking furtively from side to side as he edged further and further beneath the vehicle's heavy frame. Judging by the reaction, he had just encountered the creature that had spooked the Quarian a couple of days before. When you get to Wrex's age you attain a special appreciation of irony and that's what had him smirking now; the high-and-mighty Turian, allegedly above such petty fears, was now clutching a pistol like it was a Asari child's comfort blanket, all because of a simple bug.

Wrex was a Krogan, and all Krogan had healthy caution/paranoia of fauna (and most flora) hardwired into them, courtesy of their evolution on Tuchanka. Tales passed down from the Rachni Wars only reinforced this behaviour when it came to many-legged, arthropoidal creatures and as a result, Wrex could respect the fearful reaction this creature had instilled in his dextro chirality teammates. Still, it wasn't a particular concern for him; while his Krogan instincts would serve him well on Tuchanka, they were excessive when confronted with a creature from just about any other biosphere. And even if this creature was actually some sort of threat to him, he wouldn't need a gun; Krogan boots had crushed the Rachni underfoot one and a half thousand years ago and they'd work just as well now on any other bugs he came across.

* * *

The next day progressed much as the previous ones had, Wrex toyed with his weapons and leant against a stack of crates, Tali made a couple of trips to and from the armoury for her shotgun when she wasn't talking to the Commander, Garrus was going over the suspension systems with, literally, a fine-toothed comb, and Williams was doing her best to studiously ignore all of the aliens passing through/sleeping in the Cargo Bay. As a result, only Wrex saw the dark grey shape darting from shadowed crevice to shadowed crevice across the roof, only Wrex saw as it ambushed a moth that had decided to sit by one of the light fixtures. Observation was key to survival, whether in the wastelands of Tuchanka or in the middle of a firefight, and Wrex credited his age and continued survival to his observational skills as much as anything else; and so he observed this creature as it went about its life.

What his observations told him was that it was an accomplished predator, masterfully stalking its prey before striking precisely and with overwhelming force; tactics a Krogan Battlemaster could fully respect. It also told him that, despite its large size for a bug, it wasn't going to be any threat to him. As such, he wasn't worried when he lost sight of it and was unable to locate it and he ignored the primal fear that scratched at the back of his mind, telling him to find and end the possible threat before it found him.

* * *

It was that suppressed reaction that surfaced hours later when the spider came scuttling out from underneath a crate he had disturbed. Reacting immediately, Wrex brought his booted foot down on top of the arachnid in a hammer-blow that could be heard throughout the ship and very nearly dented the deck plating. Grunting in irritation at his own over-reaction Wrex lifted his leg up, expecting to have to scrape spider guts and pieces of exoskeleton off the well worn treads. Instead he found his boot entirely devoid of spider gore and the spider in question still calmly crouched in the same position as it had been before.

Wrex stared at it in shock for a moment; he had never met something that could survive being stomped on by a Krogan boot, not Geth Destroyers, not Batarian terrorists, not even those Thorian 'creeper' things on Feros. But this spider had barely even flinched. Quickly shaking off his surprise, he moved to kick the offending arachnid away but the Huntsman was faster and it shot behind another crate that was lying practically flush against the wall.

Ignoring the strange stares he was receiving from the various other occupants of the Cargo Bay, Wrex marched into the elevator and up to the Mess Hall. He needed to let his fight-or-fight-harder response dissipate before he went anywhere near that spider's possible location and food had proven to be an effective distraction in the past.

As he waited for the elevator to finish its ascent, he considered what had provoked this strong a reaction in him. It wasn't fear, he _knew_ that; so he settled on the next most likely option, a healthy respect for the creatures capabilities.

**[AN: This time I won't rule out possible updates, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Suggestions are very welcome, though I can't and won't guarantee I'll use them.**

**For anyone unfamiliar with Huntsman's, they're (in)famous for their remarkable resistance to being squashed, whether its shoes, books or rolled up newspapers it barely phases them.**

**As always, any feedback is appreciated and thank you for taking the time to read this story! /AN]**


End file.
